The political cartoon (?) in the Sept. 18 edition of the Oregonian was right on! McCain is pointing to a graph saying “The Fundamentals Are Strong.” The graph shows “LIES” up, “BALDFACED LIES” up, “WHOPPERS” up, “DENIAL OF OBJECTIVE REALITY” up, and “CANARDS” up! Palin is looking on with a big smile. Let’s check for facts: Palin’s acceptance speech “trips up on her facts, and Guiliani and Huckabee have their own stumbles on Night 3 of the Republican confab” (Source: www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/gop_covent’n)
Summary:
“Sarah Palin’s much awaited speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night may have shown she could play the role of attack dog, but it also showed her to be short on facts when it came to touting her own record and going after Obama’s.
We found Rudy Guiliani, who introduced her to be as factually challenged as he sometimes was back when he was in the race. But Mike Huckabee may have laid the biggest egg of all.
Palin may have said “Thanks, but no thanks” on the Bridge to Nowhere, though not until Congress had pretty much killed it already. But there was a sharp turnaround from the position she took during her gubernatorial campaign, and the town where she was mayor received lots of earmarks during her tenure.
Palin’s accusation that Obama hasn’t authored “a single major law or even a reform” in the U.S. Senate or the Illinois Senate is simply not a fair assessment. Obama has helped push through major ethics reforms in both bodies, for example.
The Alaska governor avoided some of McCain’s false claims about Obama’s tax program – but her attacks still failed to give the whole story.
Giuliani distorted the time line and substance of Obama’s statements about the conflict between Russia and Georgia. In fact, there was much less difference between his statements and those of McCain than Giuliani would have us believe.
Giuliani also said McCain had been a fighter pilot. Actually, McCain’s plane was the A-4 Skyhawk, a small bomber. It is the only plane he trained in or flew in combat, according to McCain’s own memoir.
Finally, Huckabee told conventioneers and TV viewers that Palin got more votes when she ran for Mayor of Wasilla than Biden did running for president. Not even close. The tally: Biden, 79,754 despite withdrawing from the race after the Iowa caucuses. Palin, 909 in her 1999 race, 651 in 1996″
Refer to the source above for the remaining 5 1/2 pages. It gets better.
Bob Bates
This article appears in Sep 25 – Oct 1, 2008.
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Sarah Palin, quite possibly the Titular Head of the Coming Police State, is not just a creationist, but a â ~Young Earthâ ™ creationist who believes that man and dinosaurs once shared the planet, and that the world will end in her lifetime.
Palin-tology, you might call it.
While my lifelong study of science convinces me that dinosaurs existed and were wiped out over Sixty Million Years Ago, my lifelong study of religious nutjobs convinces me that we will destroy ourselves, in the name of a Jew-Pig named Dawg, in our lifetimes.
Once again the ill-informed Bob Bates shoots off his partisan hack half cocked mouth, his rhetoric rife with his extreme socialist view but unfortunately not involving any pertinent facts. Just more of his ever present biased, crusty, befuddled old socialist opinions.
Apparently, Bates, suffering from extreme intellectual myopia, is unable to distinguish the difference between the varying elements and metrics of our economy. A recognized authority on the economy, Mike Bloomberg, said on September 15th, “I do believe the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” Bates, there is a vast difference between a mortgage meltdown and a sick overall economy. The crash of ’29 had 25% unemployment. We have 6%. That is a far cry from an overall disaster.
The reason for this current crisis is a bookkeeping rule, enforced by the SEC, that forces banks to evaluate their mortgage holdings at whatever they can get for them in the CURRENT, immediate, marketplace, not by any realistic intrinsic value. If a bank can loan on a ten to one basis relative to it’s assets, then if it’s assets are valueless in the current market, it cannot loan. Normally, a bank holding ten billion in mortgage securities could loan out a 100 billion, a ten to one ratio… if that portfolio is worth zero… the bank can loan zero. The problem here is that no one wants to touch these tainted securities, not they don’t have any actual future value. No house and property are worth nothing, now or in the future!
Clearly, Joe Blow’s house that he is failing to keep up with his mortgage payments on, is not worth zero, it has considerable real value. Only a fool presumes this one element of our diverse economy means the whole thing is a disaster. Bates should remove his noggin from his intellectual nether regions and look at the problem realistically and factually, instead of using the current financial crisis as a means to further his partisan hack wild eyed socialist bomb throwing talking points.
Don’t presume, Bates, that everyone is as ignorant and biased as you clearly are. Some of us know what is going on, you clearly don’t.
C.T.,
Could you please address the actual points that Bob makes and not bore us with you rantings? Oh, that’s right, you can’t because his points in this letter are backed up with the TRUTH. I do respect the fact that you didn’t even try and defend the lies that were presented at the Republican convention, but instead changed the subject…a cynical, but typical tactic. At least you didn’t lie like McCain, Palin, Huckabee, Thompson and Giuliani. Kudos for that.
CT
Bates is biased, as you are, but the main body of his letter deals with misrepresentations of the Republicans at the GOP convention (I assume it was our GOP convention–I didn’t see the party name represented anywhere in the hall.)
The problems with the economy may be the result of a bookkeeping rule as you claim, but given that, if you think that the ‘Fundamentals Are Strong,’ I believe you are probably the only person in the country to do so.
Certainly, my house has some intrinsic value regardless of how that value compares to the paper backing it. But the disparity of real value versus value of the loan is the problem–caused by the market decline–just one domino in a long line of dominoes that are currently falling.
Bush and McCain have gone from ‘sound fundamentals’ to dire danger in a less than ten days. They were either blowing smoke up our collective asses a week ago or totally uninformed. Do we want to believe they were lying–or unaware?
The current situation is not the result of the Neo-cons, the Repubs, the liberal socialists, or the Dems exclusively. It is the result of thirty years of uncaring deregulation and lack of oversight that before attempted to detect and identify such abuses before they became the monumental problem we have today. Lobbyists’ dollars corrupted our political system. Unbridled greed corrupted our business culture. Unchecked spending and borrowing corrupted our ‘consumer’ culture.
We’re paying the price. You may think that Bates is an uninformed kool-aid drinker on the left, but there are more than enough of the delusional and uninformed ranting and raving at every turn to go around.
“Giuliani also said McCain had been a fighter pilot. Actually, McCainâ ™s plane was the A-4 Skyhawk, a small bomber. It is the only plane he trained in or flew in combat, according to McCainâ ™s own memoir.”
Bomber or fighter, what difference does it make? The takeaway from the comment is that Obama has never so much as flown a paper airplane in service of his country